Income and employment: key points

Income, employment and health:

• Income and employment are key social determinants of population health and health inequalities.
• Reducing poverty has direct benefits for children’s social and emotional development and adult’s mental health. 
• Reducing child poverty is also likely to have indirect positive health impacts for the children and their families.
• Good work can protect against be health promoting and reduce the risk of premature mortality but work which poses higher physical risk, 'job strain', is insecure or poorly paid can be actively harmful to health.

Welfare reform:

• Reforms since 2010 have been accompanied by increased employment, increasing health inequalities and rising child poverty.
• Anticipated positive impacts on health from welfare reform had not materialised by 2019. 
• Policies to offset increases in the cost of living were introduced in the Spring of 2022. Modelling the impact of these policies suggests they are progressive, but insufficient to fully mitigate against the negative health impacts associated with costs of living.  

Poverty:

• In 2020-23, 720,000 working age adults in Scotland were living in relative poverty after housing costs - one in five working-age adults in Scotland.
• Most working-age adults and children living in poverty in Scotland live in a household where someone is in paid employment.

Inequalities:

• Weekly incomes* varied from £231 in the poorest percentile of households to £1087 in the richest percentile of households (2020-23 data, adjusting for household size).
• In the 1990s, poverty rates were highest for pensioners and children (1 in 3) while 1 in 5 working-age adults were in poverty. By 2019-22, poverty rates were lowest for pensioners and highest for children, while working-age poverty remains largely unchanged.
• Labour market demand** varied across Scotland - in 13 local authorities, there were fewer vacancies than unemployed people available for and seeking work (2022 data, **measured by job openings relative to unemployed).

* After housing costs, taxes, benefits, child maintenance payments and parental contribution to students living away from home.